“The seasons come and go. The ferns and palms die and bury the snake and his victim beneath the fallen leaves and floods bring down the waste from the hills and cover them more completely.”
“My goodness!” cried Tom. “Did you see it?”
“Not actually,” answered the professor. “All that happened a long time, years, centuries, aeons, perhaps, ago. What I know is that one day on making an excavation we found the two skeletons, that of the man and the snake in such a position as to indicate the story I have told you. I picked up the skull and the fancy took me to have it mounted and made into a pipe. But that isn’t getting on with the business.”
“Are you a zoologist?” asked Berwick.
“No,” replied the professor. “I suppose you are thinking of my title. I use that because people generally know me better that way, and—” he smiled broadly—“it’s easy to say. I am a mineralogist—a mining engineer. I got the title of professor from a college back East where I lecture occasionally on mineralogy and petrology. People haven’t time to write my name though it’s not so difficult to pronounce.”
“Sure enough,” said Jim. “I do not know your name yet.”
“Let me write it for you,” said the professor. And taking a sheet of paper this is what he penned.
Featheringstonehaughleigh.
“You will always be just plain professor to me,” determined Jim, and there was a general laugh.
“To resume,” went on the professor, “for the past three or four years I have been down in the South Sea Islands prospecting. Acting for an English syndicate which had an idea that there were some gold or silver mines that could be developed.”